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The American
Century is over. We can tell, not only because the Americans have elected a ludicrous
President, but because, for all his nationalist braggadocio, Trump’s ambitions
are so modest. He aspires, after all, only to make America great again. Not
only does this acknowledge America’s fallen state. It puts Trump’s Presidency on
the level with the likes of Erdogan and Putin. But greatness is for everyone. The
American century in its pomp was lit not by greatness, but by supremacy, the
certainty of being called by destiny, divine or secular, to play a role that
was not just unique, but above all others. This is the literal meaning of a
message that echoed down the century from Woodrow Wilson, to FDR, Kennedy,
Reagan, Bush junior and Obama. The theological strain always sounded strange in
foreign ears. But, will we miss it when it is gone?

Trump will not
be the end of America as a global power. If Trump raises Pentagon spending, American
military dominance may even increase. The technological prowess of Silicon
Valley is unrivalled and is ever more seamlessly integrated with the network of
global social media and information exchange. Wall Street remains the hub of
global finance. The Fed is pivotal to global economic policy. American lawyers,
management consultants, PR firms and lobbyists make up a global network of soft
power. However uncomfortable it may be to deal with Trump’s administration, the
America state anchors NATO and the alliance system in East Asia. Whatever
happens to NAFTA, for Canada and Mexico, America will remain as an overbearing and
inescapable neighbor.

America has not
extinguished itself. But what it has extinguished is its claim to global
political authority. That authority had been on the wane anyway. Under George
W. Bush the nimbus that surrounded the end of the Cold War, curdled into
bitterly contested hubris. Appreciating the damage that Bush had wrought, Obama
dialed down the rhetoric. But for domestic consumption he too offered a powerful
message of America’s singular role, a claim heightened by his very person. In electing
a black man as President, not only the United States but Europe too, saw the
sins of colonialism and slavery atoned. The promise of 2016 was that with
Hillary Clinton the "woman question" too would find a belated answer. As
Secretary of State Clinton had shown that she was a true inheritor of the 1990s
mantle of American global leadership – far more so than Obama. Hence, the
profound hostility she faced on the part of much of the US left and from the
Russians. Clinton’s defeat at the hands of Trump thus marks a double break with
the promise that "the arc of history bends towards hope", as Obama liked to put
it, and any claim by America to lead the way.

Insofar as Trump
is even aware of the significance of his retreat, he hails it as liberation.
Now America can act like the others, he promises, they will fear us all the
more. The sense that not being "like the others" was the whole point seems lost
on him. This is the sense in which the American Century has ended. And this is
what the world now has to deal with: a dominant superpower, still by far the
most dominant that history has ever recorded, but shorn of aspiration to moral
leadership.

For some, the ending
of the century of American exceptionalism, will come as no great shock. In
Central America, the Yankees came early, in force and without much respect for
local sensitivities. They preferred, as they say, to put "boots on the ground".
In Asia too America’s presence contained as much menace as it did promise. Disappointing
the hopes of Chinese revolutionaries like Sun Yat-Sen, Washington’s backing for
political progress after the revolution of 1911 was luke warm to say the least.
Eventually, America emerged as a strong promoter of democracy in Japan. But in
Taiwan and South Korea it took its time, not to mention in Indonesia, the
Philippines and Thailand. And then there was the quagmire of Vietnam and the secret
and lawless extension of that conflict to Cambodia and Laos. And this is before
we get into the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Saudi, and Israel.

If there is
anywhere in the world that actually has a deep stake in the normative image of
the American century, it is Europe. Indeed, one might say that America’s
century formed a whitewashed extension of Europe’s own remarkable period of global
hegemony that lasted, for sake of argument, from 1757 and the victory of
British forces over the Mughal army at Plassey on the banks of the Ganges, to
the outbreak of World War I. But it is only in retrospect from a very high
vantage point that this continuity seems real.

November 1916
was the first American Presidential election that European’s followed with
bated breath, as if our fate depended on the outcome. As far as the Entente
were concerned, then too, the wrong man won, Woodrow Wilson the anti-war
candidate. Five months later Wilson was forced into Europe’s war, not of his
own free will, but by Germany’s aggression - unleashing the U Boats, inviting Mexico to
join in an attack on Texas. America’s entry decided the war and made Wilson the
dominant figure at Versailles. But facing opposition both from the European
powers and Japan, and fierce partisan resistance at home, Wilson’s lost his
grip. Within weeks of leaving the peace conference, in the autumn of 1919 the
first American president to pretend to world leadership was humiliated by an oppositional
Republican majority in Congress that vetoed ratification and disowned American
membership in Wilson’s own creation, the League of Nations. It then went on to
refuse to negotiate a reduction in war debts, impose a ban on immigration, shut
out European trade. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve, hiked interest rates,
sucking gold back into the US, at a time when Europe was gasping for credit.

Dear Mr Tooze, i'm not J.Fischer, but i'll answer your question in english. Germany's place in a world is EUROPE. This may be bitter for an Englishman in NYC, it's also your opportunity. Your argument makes the US an occupational force in EUROPE. Why would EUROPE tolerate to be occupied ? Why should EUROPE endorse that 'morale leadership' ?

I can agree with the majority of you have written but with two exceptions.

On the one hand, the majority of the US public and many in Congress were vehemently opposed to entering the war in Europe after Wilson's re-election. The reaction by the government to such opposition was to allow for the development of sedition laws as well as the encouragement of non-government aligned organizations that took on the responsibility for repressing such opposition. As a result, many out spoken opponents of the war were either harassed mercilessly or imprisoned.

Wilson was hardly a peace candidate and you made your comments regarding German aggression not only very one-sided as England was already involved with serious war crimes through her blockade of necessities to the German Reich but that Germany alone was the aggressor. This view of WWI history has increasingly been successfully disputed by more recent historians such as Meyer.

On the second matter, I am not sure what the end of your article was supposed to infer; that Germany somehow needs to be inherently tied to the United States? So far such a tethering has done more damage to the German spirit and its political future than any other factor that I am aware of. That "tethering", especially in recent years, has done great damage to the German spirit and its own sense of self-determination.